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“From Hope And Change To Hate And Pain: How Obama Begat Trump…or (‘This Is America’)!”

As I surveyed the landscape last night, in search of a topic suitable to convey both my own opinion as well as an incisive analysis of this moment in our historical and sociological journey, I stumbled across a piece originally posted at cnn.com by Mallory Simon and Sara Sidner. While for my purpose, heading above works perfectly, the online article is entitled:

“In 2008, there was hope. In 2018, there is hurt. This is America’s state of hate.”

If I were to add a subtitle, I’d borrow from Childish Gambino; “This Is America!” Why? Because it is.

Without further ado, I give you one of the more powerful, plain spoken, fact driven assessments of our American situation that I have read this year, or any year. It is deep, but on point. I hope you take the time to read it and measure it against your own views.

In 2008, there was hope. In 2018, there is hurt. This is America’s state of hate.

By Mallory Simon and Sara Sidner, CNN

Monday, November 26th 2018, 1:19 PM HST

Updated:

Tuesday, November 27th 2018, 7:19 AM HST

By Mallory Simon and Sara Sidner, CNN

On Election Night in 2008, Americans gathered in Grant Park, Chicago. They cried tears of joy knowing Barack Obama would become the first black president.

For millions of Americans, Obama lifted the nation. For white supremacists, he lit a powder keg.

His election supercharged the divisions that have existed since the country’s birth.

The hate created two Americas. Two realities. Split-screen reactions to the same events, that continued and were exacerbated with President Trump’s victory and time in office.

When a gunman massacred nine people praying at a predominantly black church, America wept and asked for grace. But the virulent racists cheered, hailing the gunman a hero for helping to start the race war they dreamed of.

And when a gunman stormed into a synagogue just last month, declaring “all Jews must die,” Americans wept over the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history. But white supremacists breathed a sigh of relief. One of their biggest targets had been successfully attacked.

The era that started with hope and change had now become one of unapologetic hate.

Not all Americans saw it that way. Racists viewed a black man in power as a signal of the browning of America. It was the sight they feared the most. They were terrified and infuriated.

White supremacists, Klansmen and others began to vent, plot and act. As Obama called for people to come together, they used his existence to drive the nation apart.

Their rallying cry became “We have a black man in the White House and you need to do something about it,” according to Ken Parker, then a KKK Grand Dragon and neo-Nazi.

“We would even joke amongst ourselves, we’re going to send President Obama a honorary membership to the Klan because he’s our … biggest recruiting tool.”

Some racism was out in the open — especially that directed at Obama and his family.

The former President was shown as a witch doctor and photoshopped often onto “Uncle Ben’s” rice. His face was superimposed onto the body of a chimpanzee. His wife and former first lady Michelle Obama was called an “ape in heels.”

This undercurrent of racism came as the country struggled with a divided Washington and the economic crisis following the Great Recession.

Kevin Nelson, a pastor in Kentucky, knew the reality of being a black man in America. More likely to be thought a thief. To be pulled over. To be a target. The pastor knew that a black man ascending to the highest office could not magically change what happened on the ground, in the neighborhoods where attitudes were so deeply rooted.

Yet Nelson was among the cautiously optimistic: “I think like most people, I celebrated the fact that our country had come to a point where we did not allow the pigmentation of a person’s skin to stop them from getting to the Oval Office,” he told CNN recently.

Any hope for progress toward racial harmony took a hit with a seemingly never-ending run of mostly young, unarmed black men being killed, often by police officers.

White supremacists went further. The neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer published stories declaring, “Actually, No, Black Lives Don’t Matter.” They called Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown, a “heroic killer” of Brown, whom they dubbed a “black terrorist,” with no evidence whatsoever.

Then came Charleston and a man trying to start a race war.

He walked into the Mother Emanuel church and sat next to the black pastor for Bible study. For over an hour, the worshippers prayed and talked about scripture. They welcomed the stranger. Then he took out his gun, and shot them. He reloaded, and shot again. Because they were black. Because he believed lies that black people were inherently violent. And that they were always raping white women.

President Obama went to Charleston to comfort America and again try to heal some racial wounds. He sang “Amazing Grace” after delivering a eulogy and emphasized the United States of America.

But online, racists were cheering the killer.

“They had a Klan hotline and the prerecorded message, clearly said we needed more warriors like Dylann Roof,” said Parker, the former Klansman.

The message ended simply: “Hail Dylann Roof, hail victory.”

In a neo-Nazi chatroom, readers of the Daily Stormer used different symbols to celebrate attacks against non-whites, similar to Facebook’s “like” button. The Charleston killer’s bowl haircut became one of them. A caricature of the face of a Jew was another. A gas chamber button, too.

Once again, it was clear black churches were not safe. That, as in the dark days of the Civil Rights movement and the murder of four little girls in an Alabama church bombing, worshippers could be targeted for the color of their skin.

In Kentucky, Pastor Nelson started locking his church doors. He could never have known it would save his worshippers’ lives.

Not black and white

Obama’s presidency spanned a time of multiplying, complicated hate.

Between September 12, 2001, and the end of 2016, far-right extremists were responsible for 73% of deadly extremist attacks, though the numbers killed by far-right and Islamist extremist perpetrators were similar, government statistics show.

Obama would acknowledge the reality while trying to reinforce optimism in his final speech as President.

“After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic,” he admitted. “For race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. I’ve lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10, or 20, or 30 years ago.”

Donald Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail in 2016 seemed to bring those divisions out into the open. Trump received great support in perceived and outwardly racist language. From his call for a so-called Muslim ban, to denigrating Mexicans at his campaign announcement, Trump stirred America’s melting pot of diversity and haters emerged.

It wasn’t just race. Jews, Muslims, Latinos, gays, immigrants and other minority groups found themselves as targets of hate — both online and in real life.

When Trump declared he was going to Make America Great Again, racists heard a clarion call. White supremacists perceived the message as it was time to make America “white” again.

Trump’s victory coincided with readership growth on white supremacist internet sites and language on message boards like 4chan and Reddit became increasingly vitriolic. A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center looking at hate groups in 2017 found there were more than 600 groups that adhere to some form of white supremacist ideology. Within that category, neo-Nazis saw the most growth over the past year, from 99 to 121 groups.

Lawyers for a man convicted of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction to kill Somali Muslim refugees the day after the election now argue that he should be given leniency as he was swept up in Trump’s rhetoric.

The ugly words from the campaign trail seemed to be echoed on the streets, in stores and even in schools. Day after day, stories of people becoming victims of hate incidents seemed to pop up. White schoolchildren telling classmates with darker skin to go back to Mexico. Swastikas spray-painted onto temples and cars in Jewish neighborhoods. Muslims wearing head coverings attacked on the streets. Videos of the incidents shared online and ricocheting around the world.

Each incident sparked outrage in the mainstream, which helped recruiters for the hate movement. Parker was one of those recruiters, for the Klan and the National Socialist Movement. He found himself vulnerable when he left the Navy after 11 years’ service as a torpedo man on submarines and came home in a bad state to a crumbling marriage.

When he reached out online, looking to fill a void, a Klansman got back to him within 15 minutes and started sowing the hate. Parker was hooked, eventually tattooing a swastika on his chest, a white power symbol on one leg and on the other, two SS lightning bolts, a reference to Hitler’s, elite paramilitary force is now common imagery for white supremacists.

And he would recruit too, saying the goal was to “wake up the white race, let them know that we have a problem with minorities, Jewish people running everything.”

His hate spilled into real life.

“If me and another one of my white supremacist buddies were in the grocery store and we saw a Jewish person, … we’d start making fun of them,” he explains. “Like, oh, that hooked nose Jew over there, you know, probably looking for pennies,” he said. “Where you see a Muslim in the grocery store, we’d start talking about, you know, the new Mohammed cartoon … sometimes we thought about grabbing a pack of bacon and throwing it in her shopping cart and walking off.”

As he spewed his insults, websites like Daily Stormer grew its readership; the site is now visited more than 2.5 million times a month, according to data from analytics firm SimilarWeb. YouTube channels and podcasts dedicated to white supremacy began growing exponentially, creating an easy way to spread racist and religious hatred propaganda.

Anti-Semitic fliers began showing up on campuses as an attempt to sway young minds. Banners were strung across roadways.

“For race and nation,” one read. “Diversity is a code word for White Genocide,” another declared. “Danger: Sanctuary City Ahead,” read another. “You will not replace us, end immigration now,” another said.

The goal, as always, Parker explained, was to grow the numbers of people who felt the same as them.

“You can’t go into a battle with like five people,” he said. “So that was the perspective they were looking at. We’re going to have a race war one day. And the more people on our side, the better.”

Looking for a fight

If there was a war to be had, the preliminary battle seemed to be Charlottesville.

“I’m not gonna lie, like there were all kinds of people that went to Charlottesville that knew there were going to be a bunch of conflicts and they were just chomping at the bit waiting to be able to defend themselves with, like, extremely excessive force,” Parker said.

As he rode in a van to Charlottesville from Jacksonville, Florida, with “all kind of white nationalists, Southern nationalists, Nazis whatever,” he thought of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell had used a “hate bus” to harass Freedom Riders in the 1960s. Parker liked the similarities and dubbed his transport the “race bus.”

“On paper, we were just going up there to, like, stand up for the white race and defend our heritage, keep the [Confederate] monuments from coming down,” Parker says of those attending the Unite the Right rally. “But honestly, I think everybody was just going to fight.”

Charlottesville followed numerous protests nationwide on campuses and in public parks where small groups held banners declaring white supremacy, sometimes in nominal support of keeping Confederate statues to honor American history.

In Charlottesville, the white supremacists’ long-held hatred of Jews and their perceived control of the levers of power, also came out into the open.

A group of white men carrying torches marched through town shouting “Jews will not replace us.” Some chanted Nazi slogans and carried Nazi flags.

It was the most overt display of anti-Semitism in years and chilled Jews in America, who had long felt safe in the United States even as they remembered the struggles and the mass murder of the Holocaust. There had been an increase in hateful rhetoric and anti-Semitic acts in Jewish neighborhoods tracked by the ADL, but this was hate in the open with a mass following.

The next day, counter protesters gathered to challenge the Unite the Right rally. Most were peaceful but there were violent clashes between the two sides, with Antifa extremists joining the opponents.

A car was driven at a crowd of counter protesters, allegedly by a man fascinated with Nazism, killing Heather Heyer and injuring others.

Heyer’s death brought calls to end the violent hatred plaguing the country. But for some like Parker, the hate group recruiter, it brought joy. Someone who opposed their views had died.

“It was like jubilation with all the white nationalists when that happened,” Parker said.

He eventually renounced white supremacism and his hateful views after meeting a Muslim filmmaker in Charlottesville. After they spent time together, Parker realized he didn’t hate the woman. He now says he regrets his views and actions.

Those looking to spew hatred felt they were vindicated — and continue to quote Trump’s words to this day.

Some victims felt the lack of condemnation would leave hatred unchecked and raise the possibility of more violence.

“The present administration has never gotten up and said, just stop hate,” Millard Braunstein, a 91-year-old resident of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, said. “In Charlottesville the President said, there’s good people on both sides. Show me a good neo-Nazi and show me a good Ku Klux Klansmen. I mean, it just isn’t there.”

A race war did not break out after Charlottesville.

But even if America has not seen a repeat of a large white supremacist rally since, it’s arguable that no place is safe from hate.

“How could this happen in America today? That was my first thought,” Braunstein said.

For Jews, the America they saw as a sanctuary, was in many cases gone. Anti-Semitic acts in 2017 were the second highest since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking it in 1979.

Barry Werber knew what it meant to have a refuge as a Jew.

“This was the land of milk and honey,” he said. “This was where everything would be right.”

Some of Werber’s cousins died in Nazi death camps. Those who survived were permanently scarred — by numbers tattooed on their arms, and by worse.

Werber tells the story of one cousin. “He was used by the German scientists for experiments to find out if muscles will regrow once you cut them out of an arm. They had literally cut the muscles out of his arms to see if they would regrow,” Werber recalls, beginning to choke up. “And he had to live with that. Thank God I never had to go through that.”

Werber’s dose of hell would come unexpectedly, 73 years after the Holocaust and on American soil.

He went to temple to say the Mourner’s Kaddish for his mother, when a gunman walked in and shot his way through the building. Eleven of his fellow worshippers died in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history, according to the ADL.

He buried so many friends in just one week. And always with a growing fear that rather than the “Never Again” refrain that followed the Holocaust, there will be an “Again.” He worries that people may become afraid to associate with Jews as they become frequent targets. It reminds him of the shtetls, the ghettos and little villages where Jews were clustered before the Nazis came for them.

“Can it happen again? Unfortunately, it can if the wrongness continues to grow, and the allowance by any leadership allows it to grow,” Werber says. “There are always people out there willing to jump on bandwagons of hate and that’s exactly what it is.”

The Pittsburgh shooter had been on Gab, a social media site favored by alt-right followers, that is a frequent source of hate imagery and language, especially towards Jews.

Moments before the massacre, he published an anti-Semitic message, saying, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” According to an officer on the radio, the shooter told police, “All these Jews need to die.”

Locked out, but not locked up

The doors of the First Baptist Church in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, are locked.

Pastor Nelson wishes it could be an open haven, like the temple in Pittsburgh or how Mother Emanuel had been in Charleston.

But since that black church was attacked, the doors have been closed at this house of worship that serves the largest and oldest black congregation in the area, surrounded by mostly white suburbs.

“Cameras capture him trying to get in and on the sanctuary door,” Pastor Nelson says. “He bangs on it and pulls on it and he backs up, put his hand on the gun. So whoever would’ve opened it would have possibly have gotten shot and killed.”

Unable to get in, the man left. The locked doors may have saved some of Nelson’s flock, but they did not stop the hate.

The stranger went to a nearby supermarket. He walked through the sprawling aisles. He could have shot at many people, but he didn’t. He chose two. They were black. Before he was captured, the shooter told a bystander, “Whites don’t shoot whites.”

His intention was clear. He sought to take the lives of black people. One of them was Vickie Jones, who was shopping for groceries for the evening when she was gunned down.

Her nephew Kevin Gunn says he cannot believe his aunt survived breast cancer only to die at the hands of hate.

“It hurts to think that there are people who are out there who just don’t like people because they’re different, whether it’s their skin color or race, gender, sexual orientation,” he says.

He blames the rhetoric in politics and proliferation of hate online for the culture that seems to allow hate to thrive.

“We used to be able to meet people in the middle and agree to disagree,” Gunn says.

Pastor Nelson also believes things are on a dangerous course. But he’s seen where we’ve been, and as a black man living in the South there is little that surprises him anymore.

“I’m not shocked or surprised by anything because of all that we’ve gone through and continue to go through,” he says. “I’m just always saddened that in 2018 and on the brink of 2019 it still hasn’t gotten any better.”

Still he tries to give a positive message to his parishioners.

“Although things and people will get worse, we don’t have to become worse with it.”

Gunn, who lost his aunt, can’t think what worse even looks like.

“I have to sleep at night,” he says.

But he can’t help but be fearful.

“I think the more that we try to combat racism, it seems like it comes back two-fold now,” Gunn says.

“It’s kind of like the Hydra,” Gunn says, comparing racists to the multi-headed serpent of Greek mythology.

“You chop off one and then … two more pop up in its place.”

Parker, the now-repentant ex-Nazi, is getting his tattoos lasered off. As with America, the stain of hate may take a long time to disappear and eventually, hopefully, heal.